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LBSO Music Director Eckart Preu and soloist Awadagin Pratt greet the ovation following their performance of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. |
REVIEW
Long Beach Symphony, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach
DAVID J BROWN
The audience hook for the final concert in the Long Beach Symphony’s very impressive 2023-2024 season was, of course, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto—and if you regard the programming of it with Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony as a contest between Tchaikovsky’s undoubted popularity and Bruckner’s deemed reputation as box-office poison, then the former was undoubtedly the winner, given the volume of patrons in the Terrace Theater.
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Tchaikovsky in 1874, the year of the First Piano Concerto. |
But any fears that the leonine stage presence of soloist Awadagin Pratt might hint some lack of subtlety in his performance were scotched by his very first entry with those massive and equally unmistakable chords striding up the keyboard.
Here he carefully observed, as so many do not, the piano’s marking (as in the original score) of only forte compared with the preceding fortissimo orchestral tutti, and he thereafter reduced his dynamic further to provide as subtly nuanced an arpeggiated accompaniment to the big mezzo-forte 1st violins/cellos tune (which famously never returns), as anyone could desire.
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Awadagin Pratt. |
To the movement’s main cadenza Mr. Pratt brought a ruminative, improvisatory quality (though it is fully written out in Tchaikovsky’s score), and the conclusion of the movement, brought in at a fleet 20 minutes, surged with such emphatic vigor that for once the burst of applause was as justified as it was inevitable.
The opening of the Andantino simplice was marked by the delicacy of the string pizzicati, a truly dolcissimo flute solo from section principal Heather Clark, and an appropriately self-effacing piano entry. Maestro Preu maintained a steady forward motion, avoiding any indulgent lingering, but with Tchaikovsky’s restlessly sensitive scoring this gave the music a feeling of vulnerable fragility that was only enhanced by the hectic and uncarefree skittering of the central Allegro vivace assai section—all underlining that this concerto, for all its ingenuity and indelible memorability, was the work of a disturbed, even tormented, composer.
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Tchaikovsky seated on a bench in front of the Belle Vue Hotel on the Corso Imperatrice in San Remo, sometime between December 1877 and February 1878. |
For me, though, it was the performance of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 in E-flat major, WAB 104, “Romantic” that made the event most memorable. In southern California, celebrations of the 200th birth anniversary of one of the greatest of all symphonists have been remarkably thin on the ground, (very) honorable exceptions being the Santa Clarita Master Chorale’s enterprising whole-evening celebration of his choral music and a fine LAPO account of the Seventh Symphony (reviewed respectively here and here).
In Long Beach at least, this was made up for by the LBSO and Maestro Preu, a self-confessed lifelong Bruckner fan, who in his pre-concert talk (left) gave an enthusiastically spontaneous run-down of what makes this composer so individual—his very large-scale and highly sectional layout of movements; the extreme dynamic range and sudden juxtapositions thereof; his often obsessive rhythmic patterning; and the "terraced" way of orchestral scoring that was drawn originally from his organ improvisation at St. Florian Priory.
Preu also sketched in aspects of Bruckner’s personal life, his social naivety, the cautiousness of his development as a composer, and the extreme lack of self-confidence that led to so much revision, sometimes unnecessary, of his symphonies and in later life to his damaging willingness to accept advice and alterations to them by acolytes—all of which has led to an ongoing academic industry around the ever-expanding plethora of editions of his works.
The Fourth Symphony exists in at least eight versions, but in terms really meaningful to performance these devolve to three: the original of 1874 (and thus pretty much simultaneous with Tchaikovsky’s composition of his First Piano Concerto some one thousand miles east-north-east), Bruckner’s own major reworking of 1878-1880, and his final pre-publication revision (with “help”) of 1888. Of these, by far the most often performed is the 1878-1880 version, and this was what Preu and the LBSO gave us.
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Anton Bruckner in 1885. |
As an experiment to aid mutual audibility across the orchestra in the Terrace Theater’s unforgiving acoustic, a demountable baffle had been erected at the rear of the platform, and this seemed to give improved clarity to section principal Melia Badalian’s faultless intonation (mezzo-forte just as marked) of the opening solo horn motif against tremolandi in all the strings—and here they delivered the truly ppp whisper of sound demanded by the score.
On from this impressive start came an underlying sense of firm direction, with the first of the symphony’s countless fortissimo tuttis immaculate in ensemble and new-minted brightness.
With inner counterpoints clearly delineated and transitions between its various sections beautifully shaped and paced, Preu’s handling—taking only around 17 minutes compared with the 20+ sometimes heard—clearly presented the first movement as something Bruckner thoroughly got right in 1878-1880, but rarely sounding as seamless as this.
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Caricature of Bruckner improvising at the organ. |
Similarly, in a less than expert account the long literal repeat of the “Hunting” Scherzo after the Trio’s folksy twists and turns can become tiresome if there’s the slightest suspicion of rote, but here again the sheer vigor of Preu’s interpretation and the light and shade in the LBSO’s playing made it, and indeed the whole movement’s 10 minutes or so (in this movement, as with the 15-minute Andante, his tempi per se weren’t much faster than usual) pass effortlessly.
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Bruckner's tomb beneath the organ in St. Florian Priory. |
Its juxtaposing of several major and distinctive thematic groups, and their widely differing emotional character—including a steady build-up to a grandiloquent brass chorale and a thunderous recall of the work’s opening horn theme, a pensive counter-theme in the strings, and an amiable peasant dance—make it a challenge to hold together, but Preu’s command of the long view, attention to detail, and ability to carry the orchestra with him, paid full dividends.
The symphony’s final climax truly crowned the performance—no echo here of Sir Thomas Beecham’s remark in a different Brucknerian context that he “took note of six pregnancies and at least four miscarriages”—and in awe-inspiring fashion managed, as it always does in the best performances, somehow to express simultaneously tragedy, resigned acceptance, and triumph.
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Eckart Preu heralds the LBSO’s viola section for their contribution to the performance of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony. |
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Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach, Saturday, June 1, 2024, 8 p.m.
Images: The performance: Todd Mason; Awadagin Pratt: Boston Musical Intelligencer; Tchaikovsky: tchaikovsky-research.net; Bruckner: Wikimedia Commons; Bruckner's tomb: findagrave.com.
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